Torrents of text

I haven’t written a proper blog post for several weeks now. (The last two definitely don’t count!) And I have really missed writing.

I was determined not to write over Christmas because I wanted to do my best to take a week off from all of my various part-time activities. I pretty much succeeded and I’m glad I did. But it was a challenge.

I’ve discovered that not writing is hard for me. I have still been reading and thinking, you see, and it now feels as if there are a lot of thoughts backed up in my brain like a traffic jam, longing to be released on to the page, explored in words, crystallised with the precision which writing demands. And now I have so much to say that I don’t know where to start, so much to process and appropriate for myself that I can’t even think straight about any of it.Image: nuttakit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And you…well, you have the dubious privilege of reading this tumble of words as they explode, a jumbled mess of half-formed thoughts and discoveries, a torrent of text which I suspect may segue from coherence to incoherence rather too easily. So, consider yourself warned that this may be the nature of my posting for the next few weeks as I zip from topic to topic, book to book, quotation to quotation.

My writing over the next few weeks is for me; it’s an attempt to make meaning, to explore what I have learned even in the last few weeks, and to process those parts of my cognitive paradigm which are in the process of being exploded…or, at least, questioned. I don’t promise to share all that I am thinking, all that I am reacting to. Some of it is not yet ready to be explored in a public setting and it would not be appropriate to do so. That stuff stays in the journal! But, for the rest, my exploratory writings will be here.

By the time we get to February, I’d envisage that everything will have settled down, that I will have written a lot of my thoughts out of my system, that I’ll be able to resume a more consistent pattern of posting with more sustained reflections on one or two books at any one time. But, until then, who knows what I am going to be writing?!

For now, though, let me ask you a question. What have you learned in the last few weeks? And how can you process those thoughts or experiences until you get all of the learning juice out of them?!